out of 25,000 readers, only 71 will leave comments, and 2/3 of them will be jerks

IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, does a list (a “Hit List”) every day of several different articles appearing around the Interwebs. I usually submit my different articles (the more interesting ones) that I write at Celluloid Heroes, mostly because the odd person reads through the thread of suggested links. However, today (which I, as a blogger, will always remember as The Day), IMDb chose to put MY ARTICLE up on their Hit List! I squeeeeeed louder than the world’s collective fangirls would if Stephanie Meyer herself finally slash-fic’ed Edward and Jacob.

In the – I would guess – eight to ten hours the link has been up on the IMDb homepage, I’ve had over 18,000 hits on my blog. Most, obviously are directed towards My Top Ten: Antiheroes, the article in question. I did have one guy who read my rant on breaking the fourth wall (adapted from an earlier tirade posted at this blog), and said:

I have no idea how you managed to write an entire article on such a tiny thing, but you did and I was thoroughly entertained, enlightened and, er, endangered. No, that’s not right…

This was delightful in the face of the forty+ comments on the Antiheroes post that ranged from everything from mere further suggestions of antiheroes (“Cool Hand Luke not being mentioned makes this list not worth looking at.”) to a grad student writing a master’s thesis on a similiar topic and wanting to bounce ideas off each other to “None of you seem to know what an antihero is, even the guy who says what an antihero is – doesn’t know what an antihero is…” Oh, dear. I can only think he’s referring to me. I can assure you, dear lad (name listed as ‘jake’ but I prefer to call him ‘troll’.), without any pretension or arrogance, that I do indeed know what I’m talking about. I’m a little confused by this, though. It seems that in light of gender ambiguity on behalf of the author of this piece, most have assumed I was male. Hrm. This gives me an ambivalent feeling. On one hand, I’m really unnerved by the fact that people automatically assume male. Is it because it’s about film and most people working in or writing about film are male? Or is it just a generalization based on a patriarchal throw-back? On the other hand, I feel kinda flattered that the style and tone of my writing is gender neutral. I’m only saying neutral because obviously my writing didn’t scream “woman” like a few guys’-I-know handwriting does. Maybe my writing voice comes across masculine? I don’t really know.

I do feel when I write that I do have two competing voices inside me. Very yin and yang, I know. There’s always been my “serious” writing voice, and my “slightly more sarcastic, and actually quite glib” voice. Perhaps this former voice comes across female, while the latter male. It’s an assumption based on preconceived gender constructs, but there it is, nonetheless. Depending on the project, the story and the tone, one voice usually wins out. I’m finding, however, that the older I get, the more they blur together. I think, within themselves, they’re maturing as well. It’s interesting, and I don’t really know what else to say about it.

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Author: Ashleigh Rajala

Ashleigh Rajala is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in numerous journals, both online and in print. She is passionate about using story-telling to build community in Surrey BC, where she lives and works on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.
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